They have more than 100 internal game development studios and more than 12k employees
>Are there even 25 AAA games in existence
Sure. Just look at the big franchises. Pokémon, GTA, Call of Duty,
Final Fantasy, Assassin's Creed, Resident Evil, Tomb Raider, Monster Hunter, Tom Clancy's, Halo etc etc
Oh my lord there are some names on that list. Interesting that Gearbox and 3D realms are owned by the same parent company. Freaking Greasy Randy Pitchford
I do think 25 might be overstating things a bit, as they don’t seem to own quite enough AAA level studios or IP, but on the other hand they do own a crazy number of total studios.
They own or are acquiring the following AAA IPs: Metro, Deus Ex, Tomb Raider, Thief, Borderlands, LOTR/Hobbit
And those are just the ones that I personally recognize, it is possible that several of the IPs of their sub studios do qualify as AAA, but simply sounded smaller to me.
I don't know, if they are including Eidos-Montreal and Crystal Dynamics, they could easily count 3 or 4 games, studios always working on multiple projects in different capacities, we know that Crystal Dynamics is working on a new Tomb Raider and there was a rumor that Eidos-Montreal is working in a new ip, and they will probably go back to Deus Ex after that.
Some of their studio could've done A/AA games in the past and now Embracer is giving them a bigger budget.
25 AAA games in 4 years is a lot. Even if they create 2 AAA games per existing AAA IP they control in that 4 year span (which seems optimistic at best), this would still require a pretty significant number of AAA games being made based on either new IP, or IP that was historically not AAA.
Tasking a bunch of their smaller studios with developing brand new AAA IP is always possible, but potentially risky.
Also, at least historically most of the studios under Embracer are not known for doing EA's (especially sport titles) or Activision's historical (Call of Duty) approach of releasing one game in the franchise per year.
Going that route can work, but it does tend to have many releases be uninspired, or rushed, or otherwise clearly harmed by the yearly release deadline.
